Lord, I don’t like “Lords of the Fallen”

I tried how I did try

As an introduction to this piece, my father passed away in April and I’ve had a hard time focusing on anything. If anything, this essay became really difficult to finish. I want to change how I write these essays make them more fun and quicker so I can write them more consistently.

Maybe it’s just the way I work and that’s something I need to learn. But at any rate, I’m determined to publish it as I would hate for an unpublished essay on “Lords of the Fallen” of all things to be the end of my writing online.

In addition, after grappling with the many issues with wordpress I have returned to Substack because it feels like every other blogging or newsletter site wants you to pay a premium to have access to terrible design tools so I’m here for now.

Lord, I don’t like “Lords of the Fallen”

I have contrarian tendencies which I try to resist more and more as I age. When I was younger, I tended to reject something because it was popular enough to be known to everyone. Sometimes this was the correct impulse as many things I avoided have been revealed by time to be evil and mediocre. Just as often, I missed something really cool that I probably would have enjoyed if I gave it a chance. And this isn’t entirely bad either as discovering you enjoy things you thought you hated sometimes can leave you with a fresh enjoyment of something that could have grown tired over time.

All this is to say, being a contrarian is a mixed blessing as a thinker. In a -best-case scenario, a contrarian can go against popular sentiment and have views ahead of their time. However, as the contrarian impulse tends to be a knee-jerk reaction, the contrarian can become instead a reactionary, someone who’s opinions are meaninglessly opposed to the binary of popular taste.

This can help explain why before I played the 2023 reboot of “Lords of the Fallen”, I really wanted to love the game. The soulslike discourse had seen two different big titles released at the same time, “Lies of P” and “Lords of the Fallen”.  The discourse had chosen one as the success and one as the failure. Being that everyone was raving about “Lies of P”, the contrarian part of my nature chose “Lords of the Fallen” as the game I would get behind.

It wasn’t only contrarianism, I’m generally more of a fan of medieval dark fantasy than I am the kind of belle-epoque aesthetics of “Lies of P”. And of course, I was motivated by my series I’ve been doing about “Soulslikes that could use more love”. Here was a soulslike that was definitely not receiving much love.

Granted, everything I had been hearing should have warned me off the $80.00 price point.  “Lords of the Fallen” was based on a property that had often been mocked since its original version in 2013.  And the launch of the 2023 reboot had been plagued with quality-of-life issues and basic design problems. In fact, in light of its mixed reception the team at Hexworks put in an absurd amount of work to correct the perceived issues of the game, as a result the newest version of the game (patch 1.5) is a pretty different game than what initially gave the game a poor reception.  

 I realized when doing my Bloodborne piece that it’s best to start with the positives of the game before talking about the issues I had, lest it seem that I’m only here to tear the game down. I’ve enjoyed “Lords of the Fallen” a lot but the enjoyment has gradually lessened as I get closer to the end of the game. I’m currently 2/3’s of the way through the game and I’m questioning whether I will ever finish it or this essay. My opinion is that “Lords of the Fallen” is an interesting game, not a bad game by any means.  But perhaps in the future this will be seen more perhaps a clumsy first step on the way to Hexwork’s future greatness than a masterpiece in and of itself.

Lords of the Fallen” look absolutely gorgeous in its post-apocalyptic Warhammer aesthetic, helped by Unreal Engine 5’s lighting and higher fidelity. Between this and the “Demon Souls” remake by Bluepoint, we will soon be questioning how clearly we want to see our war-torn villages with piles of corpses.

The combat in Lords of the Fallen is great. The developers really understand the rhythms of souls combat and many aspects of the Lords of the Fallen combat system could be seen as an improvement on Fromsoft’s core combat engine. One is the ranged and magic system, Fromsoft has obstinately stuck to the model of putting spells on a wheel that you have to shift between. In “Lords of the Fallen”, you hold the right trigger and then press different face buttons to cast different spells. This gives you much more speed and flexibility if you want to cast or shoot different kind of arrows or throw projectiles.

I really like the kick input that you do by pressing both bumpers on the controller. The early soul’s games had a kick or guard break move you could do but it was frustratingly put behind a goofy input (forward + right bumper) that usually resulted in your character attacking when you wanted to guard break. Or worse, kicking when you meant to attack. In “Lords of the Fallen” you can do a kick input consistently.

 “Lords of the Fallen” makes many odd design decisions and one among many is that there is only one enemy with a shield. When you try to kick his shield aside, he uses a spell to stagger you. Was a whole input on the controller used for one joke? (I guess it might be useful in PVP as well). But it’s not entirely bad. While it might seem pointless to kick enemies when there is no guardbreak, it does look cool and I also got some sadistic joy in kicking enemies off of ledges.

Parrying is also handled in an innovative way. Following a lot of newer soulslike games, a parry is simply done by a timed block. And you can parry with any weapon and not just a shield. At the same time, the parrying mechanics can be frustrating. Lords of the Fallen seems like a very pro-blocking game given that there are a lot of attacks that can be parried more effectively than dodged. But the issue is that rather than just letting you block and lose stamina, you lose a portion of health that can be recovered by counterattacking. The problem with this is that it makes attempting to parry incredibly punishing because you can die by blocking several consecutive attacks. This makes sense but it feels wrong. If I block but don’t perfect block, I shouldn’t be punished for doing so.

I’ve been critical in the past of soulslike games that punish the player for not parrying correctly. The whole point of parrying in my opinion shouldn’t be “do this right or your character dies”. It should be “roll this dice and receive a reward or a punishment.”   But pulling off a parry or a backstab looks and feels great. Much like Bluelight’s remake of “Demon Souls” the parry animations are homages to violence with booming sound cues

Pieta of the Blessed Renewal

This combat system really shines in some excellent boss fights. These boss fights gave me hope when the game had started to become quite frustrating. The first major boss, “Pieta of the Blessed renewal” is great. She’s in the solid Fromsoft lineage of warrior maidens with low poise and exposed feet going with her purported saintliness. Your success depends largely on pulling off precise perfect blocks and getting critical attacks.

 The fight was exactly what I wanted from a souls game, a kind of classic duel in a field covered in gore. In her second phase, Pieta morphs into a kind a satanic angel and flies above you, wailing on you in a showy fashion as if demonstrating her martial prowess to onlookers. And once again, there was a very satisfying parry timing to learn.

Pieta is a great fight and a lot of fun to master and the bosses after her are equally fun although less memorable.

The Hushed Saint

I particulary loved “The Hushed Saint” I raved to my late father that the boss fight really captured the terror a medieval foot soldier would feel going against a mounted adversary. The Hushed Saint toys with you by charging at you on a huge horse out of nowhere and whacking you with his halberd.

Of course, this being a souls game, he illogically jumps off his horse to satisfactorily pummel you. But he starts also burrowing under the surface on horseback and manically tunneling around to pop up and smack you

While there are some duds in the boss department, most of Lords of the Fallen’s bosses are interesting at least and the best of them are a mechanical joy to fight. There are some impressively designed monsters with Fromsoft style word salad names (The Spurned Progeny) and innumerable armored swordsmen. I think the overall quality of a lot of the bosses is a good reason we can’t write off Lords of the Fallen as a poorly designed game.

The Spurned Progeny, and an intersting Dark Souls 2 reference

The storytelling in “Lords of the Fallen” is also interesting although the main plot is fairly rote. What impressed me was some of the short stories within the main narrative go unusual places. These deal with the way human desires are warped by corruption into a mockery of what the person initially wanted. These really work within the grimdark fantasy world of the game.

In “The Fief of the Chill Curse” level, a king’s desire to resurrect his dead love leads to her being reincarnated as some sort of monstrous crow. And in “The Tower of Penance”, a group of monks are increasingly tortured by their desire for futher righteousness, appointing one of their members as an inquisitor. This inquisitor becomes inhabited by a demon who torments him into more hideous acts of torture turning his pursuit of righteousness into a blasphemy. This is all successful unnerving stuff even if as a whole it doesn’t seem to add up to a full story.

A more mixed success is the game’s Umbral realm which is stylish and terrifying. Your character, the Lampbearer uses their magical Umbral lantern to enter a death dimension that looks like something out of Hellraiser. 

There are huge staircases made of bones and horrifying enemies that are like giant moth women guarding eggs of umbral energy. And because of the PS5’s graphical power, you can instantly switch to this other realm without a loading screen.

There are offbeat details such as enemies with umbral parasites attached to them which must be absorbed through your lantern. There are also a bunch of puzzles that involve finding souls that have been harnessed as doors blocking your progress and destroying them with an umbral strike. And very often, in fact, way too often, you will have to enter the umbral realm to find a path forward in the level you’re in.

An interesting conceit of the umbral realm is that your character gradually gets more souls the longer they inhabit it. At the same time, “dread” builds up and stronger enemies spawn until a grim reaper like foe will stalk you until you escape or kill him.

The problem is like many aspects of the game, there’s an element of insecurity in how the umbral world is implemented. Obviously, it’s unfair to compare a new studio like Hexworks to an experienced studio like Fromsoftware but think how comfortable Fromsoftware is with simply making their most interesting content (such as the Painted World in Dark Souls or Forsaken Castle Cainhurst in “Bloodborne”) entirely missable. This might seem insane, but it also shows an assurance in the game design. They know their own player base well enough to realize it contains people who will scour every area enough to discover Forsaken Castle Cainhurst. These same initial people are going to have their minds blown by the scope of what it contains and spread the word.

Hexworks acts as the goofus to Fromosft’s gallant by instead constantly pestering you with the existence of the Umbral realms. They seem worried that if you aren’t bashed over the head with the existence of the Umbral realms that you will miss them entirely. Again and again, you are either forced to go umbral to progress. And when this doesn’t happen, you are dragged into umbral with various sorts of ambushes which modern souls games (Fromsoftware included here) have gotten too reliant on.  The umbral mechanic of the game could have been great, but Hexworks didn’t trust it to be something players would naturally engage with.

What makes this decision worse is despite the umbral realm’s beauty, there isn’t much substance beneath its chilly surface. Hordes of zombielike enemies swarm you, mostly just getting on your nerves as you attempt to fight several mini-bosses for some loot. In truth, the umbral realm is like the realm of Oblivion in “Elder Scrolls: Oblivion”; It looks really cool the first time you encounter it, but quickly becomes a procedurally generated chore.

Fighting hordes of enemies in the umbral realm is one of the many reasons I gave up on excursions into that world and so it was immediately frustrating when the level design of the main world of Lords of the Fallen began to echo the problems with the Umbral world’s design

What’s so baffling about Lords of the Fallen is that when the game does what it’s best at, the kind of mud splattered in the face brutal sword combat, the game is great. But at least half the time instead of great fights with individual swordsmen, you’re stuck fighting waves of enemies that just stumble into you and distract you.

Souls games are not “Diablo”, fighting waves of enemies is never really going to be a soulslike thing because, soulslike games are best when fighting enemies with a complex moveset. Diablo and other horde-based shooters are games where you are mostly just avoiding hordes of enemies or optimizing your build to be pretty much invulnerable. These games have their own challenges, but you rarely would run into common enemies with more than one attack.

Lock-on combat used by soulslike engines is great for fighting individual enemies but generally lousy for fighting groups of enemies. With multiple enemies unless you take off your lock-on, you will be unable to see a bunch of attacks coming your way.

Fromsoft will overwhelm you with an ambush. but they will also give you a nice set piece where you get to fight a tough enemy. “Lords of the Fallen” by contrast is constantly sending you into areas where there are too many enemies who don’t do much besides confuse your lock-on and irritate you. Anytime a game infinitely spawns enemies that just seek to hinder you, I personally find that more annoying and a waste of time than an interesting encounter. This is not to say that an overwhelming amount of enemies can’t be scary and thrilling but if the game is consistently creating difficulty by distracting you from meaningful combat encounters rather than the difficulty being in those encounters, I start to feel as though there is an element of insecurity in the game design.

This is especially ironic given on the version of “Lords of Fallen” which I was playing the amount of enemies had been drastically reduced since earlier patches which makes me wonder what the initial amounts of enemies were.

At any rate, the large amounts of zombie-like enemies also collided with some of the most frustratingly designed levels of the game, Forsaken Fen and Lower Calraith and Upper Calraith. These levels look amazing and are memorably atmospheric. Forsaken Fen is probably one of the best-looking poison swamp areas in a video game. All of the parts of Calraith are apocalyptic, as you wind your way up through a burning city from the slums to the higher echelon. But these levels are not fun to play because the level design is so non-linear that there is never a clear path where to go. This would be ok but the large groups of enemies harry you at every turn, and so there is little joy to be had in exploring them.

From very early on the games level design reminded me of “Immortal Unchained”, where getting to each bonfire is running a stressful gauntlet of enemies. This is great when you trust the game to deliver something new at regular intervals, but when the gauntlet begins to consist of the same enemies over and over, it feels less worthwhile. And running a gauntlet with no clue where to go means that your stress is not accompanied by meaningful progress.

In the end, I had to look up the path forward because I was in danger of abandoning the game in Forsaken Fen and indeed gave up during my first playthrough in Calraith. Both levels I found increasingly maddening as I would find some side path, continue forward and then end up back where I started.

It actually makes me think of later Fromsoft levels such as Leyndell in Elden Ring which is simultaneously one of the best designed areas they have ever made and also so vast that it begins to call into question Fromsoft never providing you with a map. And while Hexworks has created some interesting interlocking levels, they are never at the level of memorable Fromsoftware design where you eventually learn each landmark.

This expansive level design is combined with a drought in terms of its enemy variety. Forsaken Fen’s zombies become a flame variant in Upper Calraith which can no longer be safely ignored as they pelt you with fireballs. And in the Frozen Fief, the zombies become an ice variant accompanied by witches who look suspiciously like a spell caster encountered in the umbral realm.

 One video I watched on the game brought up how “Lords of the Fallen” has as many enemies as “Demon’s Souls” but is also 30 hours shorter than that game. This begins to show in the eagerness to recycle bosses as common enemies, something I’m never a huge fan of. Ruiner starts out as a boss outside of Calraith and then within becomes a common mini-boss. One of the coolest looking bosses, Mendacious Visage begins to make all too common an appearance in the Umbral realm. Crimson Rector Percival (who looks like a tribute to the Penitent one from “Blasphemous”) is a great boss but annoying as a common enemy in the Manse of the Hallowed Brothers.  And no sooner do you gain access to the Tower of Penance by defeating Blessed Carrion Knight Sanisho than you start fighting them as a common enemy type within the tower.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with recycling enemies but when recycling begins to be used at this level, it speaks to a lack of time and resources within the studio. Clearly Hexworks is capable of designing some cool enemies, I particularly love the rangers in the Frozen Fief who camouflage themselves in snow (and who inexplicably show up as a poison variant at the bottom of Sunless Skein) but it’s very apparent as you get closer to the end of the game that they really only had enough enemies for a much shorter game.             

With this enemy recycling as well, a lot of the areas begin to lose the individuality they had in their beautiful looking levels. The game world begins to suffer a bit because around any corner can be an enemy that you encountered at hour 1 or a boss you encountered at hour 20.

This lack of enemy variety, expansive and confusing level design and proliferation of common enemies make the game start to feel like a real slog as you enter the tower of penance. And it was after completing that level and arriving at an underwhelming boss at the sisterhood that I gave up.

“Lords of the Fallen” is an interesting game and I think that Hexworks could make a great soulslike if they’re given a chance to grow. But unfortunately, the 2023 reboot of the series has to be classed as an overly ambitious failure rather than a masterpiece.  Hexworks had great ideas but didn’t have the experience or resources to deliver the game they wanted to make. Granted with the many quality of life patches, the game has gotten much closer but given the lack of enemy variety and the excessive length of the game I don’t think any patch would really fix the core issues.

I hope that Hexworks gets to make a sequel that delivers on the promise of the first game but I have to give up at this point before I lose heart with soulslikes and game writing in general.